Sabol-led NFL Films still going strong after many years

By David Barron |
July 3, 2008

NFL Films president Steve Sabol, shown in 2000, said that his company is doing fine despite widespread concerns.

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. — The first of Steve Sabol's collections visible upon arrival at NFL Films' headquarters in suburban Philadelphia is the 90-plus Emmy statues the company has earned since the early 1960s, testament to its expertise as the Homer and/or Virgil of professional pigskin mythology.

Sabol's newest collection is esoteric even by his standards. Alongside the two dozen or so filing boxes filled with notes and details for future film projects resides a budding nest of toy dinosaurs, contributed by well-wishers and friends after a recent suggestion that as media morphs in the digital age, NFL Films is headed in the direction of the T-Rex and raptor.

In a similar vein, pinned to Sabol's bulletin board is a copy of a suggested new design for NFL Films stationery, rendered in the same typeface as the logo for the movie Jurassic Park.

"People sent me these things and said, 'Dinosaurs may be extinct, but they lived for 10 million years, so don't worry,' " Sabol said. "It was nice. There were a lot of people who were genuinely concerned. I was touched by it."

There are fewer faces these days around NFL Films, which in part promoted the dinosaurs and the calls of concern. The company laid off 21 of 283 employees earlier this year in the wake of suggestions that its epic style of filmmaking had fallen out of favor with viewers and the NFL's corporate hierarchy, which is focused on pumping up the struggling NFL Network.

"It seemed to be sort of an emotional and sentimental thing with people," Sabol said. "They've been calling to ask if we're doing OK."

In fact, Sabol said, things are fine.

After a year in which the NFL Network seemingly struggled to find a role for NFL Films, the company is developing three new series that will air on Thursday nights this fall.

Starting 11 will be a football-sized weekly top-10 show, listing 11 points of interest for the coming week, such as strangest play, biggest blooper or greatest catch. It will be followed by Sounds of the Game, which will match the best sideline sound of the week with excerpts from players miked during games and classic sound bites from the NFL Films library.

"What we lack in coherence, we will make up in energy and innovation," Sabol said. "It's going to be like building an airplane in flight. We have footage, and we will use it to make an observation about the week in the NFL."

America's Game, which accounts for the latest Emmys in the company collection, returns Sept. 3 with an episode on the 2007 New York Giants featuring Tom Coughlin, Michael Strahan and Eli Manning, followed by a five-episode miniseries titled Missing Rings, which gives America's Game treatment to five teams from franchises that have never won a Super Bowl.

The other two never made it to the Super Bowl — the 1998 Vikings, led by Cris Carter and Randall Cunningham, who lost to Atlanta in the NFC title game; and the Chargers' Air Coryell contingent from 1981, which lost the AFC title game to the Bengals in minus-59 wind chill.

"What is great about those shows is the Shakespearean arc, which makes them even more dramatic, emotional and compelling," Sabol said. "You introduce these people and build them up, and they're the heroes, and yet the audience knows that, geez, they're going to die in the end."

The shows are in keeping with the tradition of NFL Films, which, according to a league executive quoted by the Philadelphia Daily News, isn't necessarily in keeping with the tradition of the NFL Network.

"The shots that people associate with Films — those long, beautiful, super slo-mo shots of a spiraling football — the NFL Network people hate that," the official said. "It's too slow for them. ... The people they've brought in are either from ESPN or Best Damn Sports Show. And they have their idea of what's good television. It's a vastly different kind of thing than what NFL Films has produced."

Charles Coplin, vice president of programming for NFL Network, said he "bristles" at such suggestions.

"Since we've been on the air, Films has been an integral part of what we've done," he said. "Films was never designed to be a news and information outlet. That is not their core competency. We've taken advantage of everything NFL Films offers while also trying to develop a good news and information capability and to do remote shows surrounding our games. They're a big part of what we do, and I don't see that changing."

Sabol also is developing an NFL's Greatest Games episode for ESPN on the "Sea of Hands" playoff game between the Raiders and Dolphins in 1974, gearing up for the move of Inside the NFL from HBO to Showtime, and preparing for the newest edition of HBO's Hard Knocks training camp series, which focuses this year on the Cowboys.

Enhanced Internet presence

"We couldn't ask for anything better," Sabol said. "We're doing one totally contemporary show (Starting 11), Sounds of the Game uses our archives, and America's Game is right in our wheelhouse. We don't have to do them on a daily basis, which also plays into our strength."

Sabol said NFL Films also will have a beefed-up presence at nfl.com as it continues to digitize its 110 million feet of film. He is less definitive as to when the league may offer video on demand of past shows or great plays from its archives, but he said those services remain on the horizon.

In the meantime, Sabol is gearing up to spend training camp with Jerry Jones and rooting quietly for a resolution to the continued carriage disputes between the NFL Network and Cablevision, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

"When that's settled, then we can shift into four-wheel drive," Sabol said.